Hawaiian Seascapes and Landscapes: Reconstructing Elements of a Polynesian Ecological Knowledge System

Abstract

Early western appreciations of the Hawaiian way of life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggested the pre-contact presence of highly structured regional chiefdoms and well-developed political economies founded upon elaborate knowledge of maritime and terrestrial environments. These first brief reports were substantiated and amplified in the mid- and late nineteenth-century published works of Native Hawaiian scholars who described a number of named landscape and seascape elements from which Hawaiians drew most of their subsistence base and material culture. Beginning in the 1950s, ethnologists, archaeologists and other investigators built upon these earlier accounts while studying Polynesian colonisation and occupation of Hawai‘i. From the 1960s to the present, this research trajectory expanded into Hawaiian human ecology and political economy, refining former portraits of the subsistence strategies, environmental modifications and ecological knowledge employed by Hawaiians before Euro-American acculturative forces radically changed customary land-use patterns. Using an innovative theoretical framework recently proposed for ethnoecological research by Eugene Hunn and the author as the analytical backdrop, this paper will draw upon these sources, as well as new data from the Hawaiian Native Register of land claims (1846–1862) and unpublished contemporary reports, to evaluate aspects of traditional Hawaiian ecological knowledge as it may have existed to order and permit exploitation of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century marine and terrestrial environments.